The Understructure of Writing for Film and Television
Page 17
Do we have to have that fan on?
BLANCHE
No!
MITCH
I don’t like fans.
BLANCHE
Then let’s turn it off, honey. I’m not partial to them!
She presses the switch and the fan nods slowly off. She clears her throat uneasily as Mitch plumps himself down on the bed in the bedroom and lights a cigarette.
BLANCHE
I don’t know what there is to drink. I—haven’t investigated.
MITCH
I don’t want Stan’s liquor.
BLANCHE
It isn’t Stan’s. Everything here isn’t Stan’s. Some things on the premises are actually mine! How is your mother? Isn’t your mother well?
MITCH
Why?
BLANCHE
Something’s the matter tonight, but never mind. I won’t cross-examine the witness. I’ll just—
She touches her forehead vaguely. The POLKA TUNE starts up again, [OVER].
BLANCHE (CONT’D)
Pretend I don’t notice anything different about you! That—music again . . .
MITCH
What music?
BLANCHE
The Varsouviana! The polka tune they were playing when Allan—wait!
A distant REVOLVER SHOT IS HEARD. Blanche seems relieved.
BLANCHE (CONT’D)
There now, the shot! It always stops after that.
The POLKA MUSIC DIES OUT again.
BLANCHE (CONT’D)
Yes, now it’s stopped.
MITCH
Are you boxed out of your mind?
BLANCHE
I’ll go and see what I can find in the way of—. Oh, by the way, excuse me for not being dressed. But I’d practically given you up! Had you forgotten your invitation to supper?
She crosses into the closet and pretends to search for the bottle.
CLOSEUP: MITCH
MITCH
I wasn’t going to see you anymore.
BACK TO SHOT
BLANCHE
Wait a minute. I can’t hear what you’re saying and you talk so little that when you do say something, I don’t
(MORE)
BLANCHE (CONT’D)
want to miss a single syllable of it . . . What am I looking here for? Oh, yes—liquor! We’ve had so much excitement around here this evening that I am boxed out of my mind.
She pretends to find the bottle. Mitch draws his foot up on the bed and stares at her contemptuously.
BLANCHE
Here’s something. Southern Comfort!
What is that, I wonder?
MITCH
If you don’t know, it must belong to Stan.
BLANCHE
Take your foot off the bed. It has a light cover on it. Of course, you boys don’t notice things like that. I’ve done so much with this place since I’ve been here.
MITCH
I bet you have.
BLANCHE
You saw it before I came. Well, look at it now! This room is almost—dainty! I want to keep it that way. I wonder if this stuff ought to be mixed with something?
(trying some in a glass)
Ummm, it’s sweet, so sweet! It’s terribly, terribly sweet! Why, it’s a liqueur, I believe.
(Mitch grunts)
I’m afraid you won’t like it, but try it, and maybe you will.
CLOSER ON MITCH & BLANCHE
MITCH
I told you already I don’t want none of his liquor and I mean it. You ought to lay off his liquor. He says you been lapping it up all summer like a wildcat!
BLANCHE
What a fantastic statement! Fantastic of him to say it, fantastic of you to repeat it! I won’t descend to the level of such cheap accusations to answer them, even!
MITCH
Huh.
BLANCHE
What’s on your mind? I see something in your eyes!
[DRAW BACK as Mitch gets up.]
MITCH
It’s dark in here.
BLANCHE
I like it dark. The dark is comforting to me.
MITCH
I don’t think I ever seen you in the light.
(Blanche laughs breathlessly)
That’s a fact.
BLANCHE
Is it?
MITCH
I’ve never seen you in the afternoon.
BLANCHE
Whose fault is that?
MITCH
You never want to go out in the afternoon.
BLANCHE
Why Mitch, you’re at the plant in the afternoon!
MITCH
Not Sunday afternoon. I’ve asked you to go out with me sometimes on Sundays but you always make an excuse. You never want to go out till after six and then it’s always some place that’s not lighted much.
BLANCHE
There is some obscure meaning in all this but I fail to catch it.
MITCH
What it means is I’ve never had a real good look at you, Blanche. Let’s turn the light on here.
BLANCHE
(fearfully)
Light? Which light? What for?
MITCH
This one with the paper thing on it.
He tears the paper lantern off the light bulb. She utters a frightened gasp.
BLANCHE
What did you do that for?
MITCH
So I can take a look at you good and plain!
BLANCHE
Of course you don’t really mean to be insulting!
MITCH
No, just realistic.
BLANCHE
I don’t want realism. I want magic!
(Mitch laughs)
Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!—Don’t turn the light on!
NEW ANGLE
Mitch crosses to the switch. He turns the light on and stares at her.
CLOSEUP: BLANCHE
She cries out and covers her face.
BACK TO SHOT
He turns the light off again. Slowly and bitterly:
MITCH
I don’t mind you being older than what I thought. But all the rest of it—Christ! That pitch about your ideals being so old-fashioned and all the malarkey that you’ve dished out all summer. Oh, I knew you weren’t sixteen any more. But I was fool enough to believe you was straight.
BLANCHE
Who told you I wasn’t—“straight”? My loving brother-in-law. And you believed him.
MITCH
I called him a liar at first. And then I checked on the story. First I asked our supply-man who travels through Lau-
(MORE)
MITCH (CONT’D)
rel. And then I talked directly over long distance to this merchant.
BLANCHE
Who is this merchant?
MITCH
Kiefaber.
BLANCHE
The merchant Kiefaber of Laurel! I know the man. He whistled at me. I put him in his place. So now for revenge he makes up stories about me.
MITCH
Three people, Kiefaber, Stanley and Shaw, swore to them!
BLANCHE
Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub! And such a filthy tub!
MITCH
Didn’t you stay at a hotel called The Flamingo?
BLANCHE
Flamingo? No! Tarantula was the name of it! I stayed at a hotel called The Tarantula Arms!
MITCH
(stupidly)
Tarantula?
FAVOR BLANCHE
BLANCHE
Yes, a big spider! That’s where I brought my victims!
(she pours herself another drink)
BLANCHE (CONT’D)
Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allan—intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with. . . . I think it was panic, just panic, that drove m
e from one to another, hunting for some protection—here and there, in the most—unlikely places—even at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy but—somebody wrote the superintendent about it—“This woman is morally unfit for her position!”
She throws back her head with convulsive, sobbing laughter. Then she repeats the statement, gasps, and drinks.
BLANCHE (CONT’D)
True? Yes, I suppose—unfit somehow—anyway. . . . So I came here. There was nowhere else I could go. I was played out. You know what played out is?
ON MITCH
[as he stares at her.]
FAVOR BLANCHE
BLANCHE (CONT’D)
My youth was suddenly gone up the water-spout, and—I met you. You said you needed somebody. Well, I needed somebody, too. I thanked God for you, because you seemed to be gentle—a cleft in the rock of the world I could hide in! But I guess I was asking, hoping—too much! Kiefaber, Stanley and Shaw have tied an old tin
(MORE)
BLANCHE (CONT’D)
can to the tail of the kite.
MITCH & BLANCHE
There is a pause. Mitch stares at her dumbly.
MITCH
You lied to me, Blanche.
BLANCHE
Don’t say I lied to you.
MITCH
Lies, lies, inside and out, all lies.
BLANCHE
Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart . . .
EXT. KOWALSKI APT. NIGHT
A vendor comes around the corner. She is a MEXICAN WOMAN in a dark shawl, carrying bunches of those gaudy tin flowers that lower class Mexicans display at funerals and other festive occasions. She is calling barely audibly. Her figure is only faintly visible outside the building.
MEXICAN WOMAN
Flores. Flores. Flores para los muertos.
Flores. Flores.
INT. BEDROOM: BLANCHE & MITCH NIGHT
BLANCHE
What? Oh! Somebody outside . . .
She goes to the door, opens it and stares at the Mexican woman.
BLANCHE’S POV
[of the Mexican woman at the door who offers Blanche some of her flowers.]
MEXICAN WOMAN
Flores? Flores para los muertos?
ON BLANCHE
BLANCHE
(frightened)
No, no! Not now! Not now!
She darts back into the apartment slamming the door.
EXT. KOWALSKI APT NIGHT
[The Mexican woman] turns away and moves down the street.
MEXICAN WOMAN
Flores para los muertos . . .
INT. BY DOOR: BLANCHE NIGHT
The polka tune FADES IN, [OVER].
BLANCHE
(to herself)
Crumble and fade and—regrets—recriminations . . . “If you’d done this, it wouldn’t’ve cost me that!”
MEXICAN WOMAN, OS
Corones para los muertos.
Corones . . .
BLANCHE
Legacies! Huh . . . And other things such as bloodstained pillow-slips—“Her linen needs changing”—“Yes, Mother. But couldn’t we get a colored girl to do it?” No, we couldn’t of course. Everything gone but the—
MEXICAN WOMAN, OS
Flores.
ANOTHER ANGLE
[SHOWING Mitch watching Blanche as she drifts back to him.]
MITCH & BLANCHE
BLANCHE
Death—I used to sit here and she
(MORE)
BLANCHE (CONT’D)
used to sit over there and death was as close as you are. . . . We didn’t even dare admit we had ever heard of it!
MEXICAN WOMAN, OS
Flores para los muertos, flores—flores.
BLANCHE
The opposite is desire.
(at Mitch)
So do you wonder? How could you possibly wonder! Not far from Belle Reve, before we had lost Belle Reve, was a camp where they trained young soldiers. On Saturday nights they would go in town to get drunk—
MEXICAN WOMAN, OS
(softly)
Corones . . .
BLANCHE
and on the way back they would stagger onto my lawn and call—“Blanche! Blanche!”—The deaf old lady remaining suspected nothing. But sometimes I slipped outside to answer their calls. . . . Later the paddy-wagon would gather them up like daisies . . . the long way home . . .
. . . Blanche goes to her dresser and leans forward on it. After a moment, Mitch rises and follows her purposefully. The POLKA MUSIC FADES AWAY. He places his hands on her waist and tries to turn her about.
CLOSE TWO SHOT: MITCH & BLANCHE
BLANCHE
What do you want?
MITCH
(fumbling to embrace her)
What I been missing all summer.
BLANCHE
Then marry me, Mitch!
MITCH
I don’t think I want to marry you any more.
BLANCHE
No?
Dropping his hands from her waist.
MITCH
You’re not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother.
BLANCHE
Go away, then.
(he stares at her)
Get out of here quick before I start screaming fire!
(her throat is tightening with hysteria)
Get out of here quick before I start screaming fire.
He still remains staring. She suddenly rushes to the big window with its pale blue square of the soft summer light and cries wildly
BLANCHE (CONT’D)
Fire! Fire! Fire!
With a startled gasp, Mitch turns and goes out the outer door. [We HEAR HIM CLATTER] down the steps and around the corner of the building [os]. Blanche staggers back from the window and falls to her knees. The distant PIANO is slow and blue.
FADE OUT4
This scene has as individual a stamp as the one from Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. Both are powerful confrontations rich in reverse and the unexpected ways in which their protagonists are challenged and respond. The past is a powerful element in both; a contest over the meaning of the past is the tool Williams uses to dramatize the irreconcilable differences between Blanche and Mitch and which Blanche daringly tries to use to gain her objective. Williams makes a particularly pointed use of symbol and invests the scene with a blend of gutter realism and lyricism that peaks in its crisis and climax. Jot down your notes on Williams’s use of symbol, silence, and spectacle and on the scene’s structure, and then compare them to ours.
Symbol, Spectacle, Silence—and Music
If symbol is to be effective, it must function within a clearly defined context: it is not a substitute for detail, but an amplification. Look how much is communicated to us as the scene opens. Blanche is seated, alone. She’s hunched, tense. She’s drinking. It’s hot—the electric fan is working. Nothing is said, yet already we know she’s a woman down on her luck and feeling bad about it.
Her re-covered chair emphasizes the odd blend of poor and elegant in her physical surroundings. It shows us a woman at odds with the setting in which she lives. And, at once casual and overtly symbolic, her red robe is specifically called a “scarlet” robe. A woman in red is a fallen woman. Her loneliness and robe plant a subliminal suggestion that she is abandoned because she is fallen: that is the fate of the fallen. We are amply prepared for Mitch’s and Blanche’s revelations, which confirm this feeling with an economy only symbol, used properly, can provide.
Now look at Mitch as he appears. He’s in work denims and unshaven. At the time Williams wrote his play work denims were more sharply suggestive of a particular economic class than now. But we know Mitch is a buddy of Stanley Kowalski, a fellow factory worker. So his clothes are more than appropriate: they symbolize a life and outlook poles apart from Blanche’s. Moreover, those clothes worn even now show us Mitch hasn’t come to Blanche for a date, however late he is. He’s come for something else.
Notice just two other detai
ls that take on a symbolic weight. First, the use of Southern Comfort. Blanche’s “finding” it is a lie. Then she turns the drink into a symbol by asking, “Southern Comfort! What is that, I wonder?” That is like asking, What is Southern, Southern comfort? “If you don’t know,” responds Mitch, “it must belong to Stan.” A thing is just a thing to Mitch: he neither thinks of the dying South of traditional comfort or aristocratic pretension nor senses her implication. He is mentally and culturally barren. The exchange about “Southern Comfort” characterizes both of them with great force, but in opposite ways.
That’s a lot to get out of so simple an exchange, yet Williams doesn’t blow it out of proportion by dwelling on it. He moves on swiftly. The power of the exchange adds its weight to that already operating on us from the scene’s start. But notice how appropriate and unforced “Southern Comfort” is: we knew Blanche was drinking, and she could have been drinking Southern Comfort as logically as anything else. A symbol has to fit naturally into its surroundings.
Last, look at how Williams plays with light. Light is as old a symbol as there is. To shed light on something, to bring something into the light, or to turn on the light all mean getting at the truth. The scene itself is dimly lit: there is a lot in darkness or shadow, literally and suggestively. Mitch informs us Blanche avoids bright light, only seeing him in the evening or dim surroundings. When Mitch says, “Let’s turn the light on here,” he rips the covering off the light to see the truth about Blanche. Mitch looks. She cries out and turns her face away. Mitch turns the light off, embittered. Williams drives this symbolic usage home by Blanche’s overt defiance of the light in her preference for magic, for what ought to be the truth. Even the covering Mitch rips off the light is one Blanche had made to give the light a little class.
These touches add weight to the scene; they help evoke the sense that great issues are at stake without the author’s having to raise them overtly or discursively. We are made to feel these issues: we experience the scene on a highly personal level. We think about it later. For the most part Williams is careful to make symbols seem natural elements of the scene or character so that we don’t think, Aha! Symbols! His touch falters with the use of the Mexican woman and her flowers for the dead. After the first time or two we hear her chant and see Blanche’s reaction to it, we have the sense of being hit over the head with symbolic meaning. Never use a symbol that way! Only the strength of his prior writing carries Williams through this flaw.
Spectacle plays little role in this scene. We are familiar with the appearance of the neighborhood and apartment by this point in the story: nothing new is added by seeing them again. There are no great or sweeping effects. Hundreds of longshoremen don’t hang on the action. What counts instead are the details of the setting that the camera can emphasize: details of clothing or appearance and the elements Blanche has contributed like the chair or the shade for the light. These are all small, but cumulatively revealing. They relate directly to place and character, just the sort of detail we mean for you to find for your own scenes.